Jewish Radicalism in Poland

The presence of large and heterogeneous Jewish
communities on Polish soil dates back to the 12th century. From the
16th to the 18th centuries they were regarded as the very soul of
Ashkenazi Jewish culture and religion. At that time a number of
important Jewish communities in western Europe, such as the ones in
Amsterdam and Antwerp, recruited rabbis who had studied at the yeshivas of central Poland. All of this altered quite quickly during the 18th century as a result of the belated assertiveness of the Haskalah
(Jewish enlightenment) movement as well as of the increasingly
widespread backwardness of central and eastern Europe. In the first
half of the 19th century on the soil of what was known as Congress
Poland (established in 1815 and belonging to Russia) people following
the religion of Moses accounted for nearly 10% of the population and
were decidedly different from their own coreligionists from the less
sizable German and French communities. From 1880 and in the wake of the
first pogroms, a great wave of westward migration began; during this
time the Jews of Russia and Austro-Hungarian Galicia, drawn from the
territories of what had been ancient Poland, but which was now divided
between the two empires, still accounted for 80% of Europe’s Jews, in
strictly demographic terms.

As a body they had long and rightly been regarded
as an extremely traditionalist, conservative and politically unreliable
group, not only by their Polish and Russian neighbours but also by
their brethren from western Europe. Here the growing Jewish presence in
new ideological and social movements was starting to invite
anti-semitic criticism from western conservatives who argued that the
Jews were, by nature, dangerous radicals bent on organising a worldwide
revolution. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, another leftwing
stereotype prevailed, which regarded Jews as usurers and capitalists
and diehard defenders of an iniquitous established social order.1
It was only thanks to the upstart presence of Jews in political and
social endeavours in the last two decades of the 19th century,
alongside the reawakening of the aspirations of the Russian Empire’s
many peoples, that the old picture was altered and it changed to such
an extent that by the early years of the new century, the Okhrana was
successfully exploiting the myth of Jewish radicalism in the famous
forgery at the heart of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.2

This present essay will deal only with this
latter period, from 1881 to 1917, that is, the first two generations of
radicals of Jewish extraction with a presence on the soil of Poland, or
rather, the few among them who had plumped for libertarian options.
Besides, in order to examine this subject properly in its historical
context, we must first look at a number of the methodological problems
involved. Traditionally the issue of Jewish radicalism has been
explained by recourse to two keynote ideas. The first which, as I see
it, can be argued with some legitimacy, states that the problem is
non-existent, given the absence of any specific link between Jewishness
and radicalism. Those who take this line stress the fact that, whilst
there may have been many important radical Jews in religious, social
and political movements of various kinds, the radicals as such were
always a tiny minority set alongside the Jewish community as a whole.
For instance, in the Polish Communist Party (KPP) which, before the war
also included activists drawn from the western areas of what are
Byelorussia and Ukraine today, the percentage of members of Jewish
extraction amounted to 26% but the local election results, the only
ones in which it saw fit to run (under a different name) show that even
among the Jews themselves the KPP cold only command 1%-2% of the vote.3
Supporters of this argument also point out that the higher the social
standing or economic status of the Jews, the less they favoured radical
political stances, as is striking if we compare the France or the
United States of today with the period leading up to the Second World
War. Taken on its own, looked at in this light, the Jewish radicals
were no different from radicals of different extractions and their
motives were dictated by circumstance and external factors.

The second interpretation searches out a number
of specific connections between being Jewish in the highest sense and
the tendency to look for radical solutions. Among the factors normally
regarded as being at the root of this phenomenon, there are the
supposedly revolutionary strands in Judaism (see M. Löwy), great
sensitivity to matters relating to justice or affecting religion and a
way of thinking that tends to call everything into question. Academics
who incline towards psychological or sociological analyses highlight
the marginalisation and particular “pariah” role in which Jews found
themselves cast in a society undergoing the process of modernisation
(see H. Arendt, M. Wistrich) and, more importantly, the relative
durability of the attitudes generated by such circumstances (I. Berlin,
P. Gay 4 ). Such
interpretations all have one thing in common: they are out to explain,
not so much radicalism per se, as the propensity towards radicalism.
Furthermore there is an over-concentration of the question: how was
this possible? We on the other hand, if we are interested in the
libertarian model of radical militance, should be asking ourselves the
question (at least insofar as it relates to Polish Jews): how come this
phenomenon was so weak compared to the other brands of political commitment?

The problem of such a
disproportionately slim presence as compared not only with the presence
of marxist Jews as well as of their more Russified compatriots from the
lands of eastern Poland, has never been seriously posed, let alone
explored. One possible explanation lies in the fact that the
historiography on the subject was, as one might have expected, rooted
in the exploration of Russian sources. From their point of view the
lame, sporadic disposition to libertarian activism west of Vilnius was
pretty much irrelevant insofar as it was happening in the region with
the greatest Jewish influence. Indeed writers like Paul Avrich and
Moshe Goncharok cite only activists and events directly related to the
Russian Jews within the movement. Besides, they appear utterly ignorant
of the ideological and indeed cultural differences to be found among
the westernised radical Jews of the territories of “Congress” Poland.5
The Polish Jews themselves felt compelled to defend their own good name
against constant charges that they had revolutionary and illegalist
tendencies, charges that were finally encapsulated by the formula Zydokumuina
(Jewish communism). They strove to play the issue down or be dismissive
of it. In the eyes of the Jewish community, including the most
forward-looking part thereof, anarchists of Jewish extraction were
caught up in the most extreme and unacceptable form of desecration of
their national traditions. Their choices looked like a full-on
challenge to the retention of any distinctive character at the very
point when Poland, and with it the Jews themselves as a definite
confessional group, was beginning to become a modern nation; hence the
widespread hatred and prejudice and often, silence, that were reserved
for anarchists.

As far as Polish historiography goes, the
situation there is even more complicated in that here we are dealing
with the intersection between Jews and anarchists: two “highly
delicate” phenomena, so to speak, for successive generations of the
Polish intelligentsia. Because of historical circumstances, anarchism
per se held no widespread appeal or interest in this area. Prior to
1918, when Poland as a state was non-existent, being anarchists simply
meant treachery to the nation, but even later it stood for brazen
defiance of the mighty Catholic church. Which explains why the number
of Polish anarchists living on their native soil (as opposed to living
abroad as emigrés) was always very small and why anarcho-syndicalism
never took off there the way it did in the Czech lands. Even today the
biographies of its best known sympathisers, such as Edward Abramowski
for instance, try to ignore this aspect of their history. The business
of the Jews was, in any case, a highly controversial one discussed with
extreme prejudice and also, more often than not, shrouded in a great
deal of ignorance. No tendency out of step with Polish national
aspirations could boast an accurate grasp of the reality of them.
Especially the ones that were against religion as a matter of
principle. In post-Shoah Poland the only topics acceptable in
debate were those chosen by the marxist movements. Then, following the
anti-Semitic purges in 1968, even those avenues were cut off. For
nearly 20 years the matter we are dealing with was virtually unutterable.

In contemporary Poland, whilst matters relating
to Judaism are still “hot potatoes” and, up until recently, “all but
forgotten territory”, they are of great interest not just to
researchers but also to the wider public, but little has appeared in
writing thus far on the Jewish followers of Bakunin and Kropotkin. This
cannot be entirely explained away in terms of the widespread
unpopularity from which all such matters in any way linked to marxism
have suffered in Poland. Other factors seem to have played greater parts.

Writers trying to keep
alive the memory of the great traditions of Polish Jews have steered
clear of this small area, not just on account of anarchism’s
unpopularity, but also on account of the utter absence of the requisite
information, as well as out of the deeply rooted but mistaken belief
that Jewish anarchists, by abjuring their religion and their
traditions, had completely lost their “identity” and become typical
representatives of what Isaac Deutscher termed the “non-Jewish Jews”.6
The inaccessibility of sources and of a dearth of literature
(especially in Yiddish, a language little used these days) has
undoubtedly been a significant factor. What sources survived the Shoah on Polish soil are very limited and one-sided. A typical anthology of documents drawn from the Archiwum Glówne Akt Dawnych (AGAD, the leading Polish archive of ancient documents) was compiled by Herman Rapaport.7
That anthology contains Russian police documents dating back to the
1905 Revolution. There would no point in searching for documents there
that deal with the militants or their views objectively. Important
documents of this sort are to be found abroad, scattered throughout the
countries to which sizable groups of militants migrated, in cities such
as, say, Paris, London, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Montevideo or, above
all, New York where reviews and publishing houses were founded. Thus an
interesting collection has survived in the Labadie Collection of the
Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There there are
rare newspapers as well as some personal memoirs generally drafted with
an eye to posterity. Such sources have been widely utilised and to good
effect by Avrich in his researches into the later stages of the Russian
anarchist movement.8 To a
lesser extent, some material on Poland can be found in the rich
collections of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Social History.

Now we can turn back to the circumstances
surrounding the radicalisation of increasingly wider swathes of the
younger generation of Jews, helping to mould them. The revolutionary
potential of Polish Jews was first revealed in the 18th century when
the new Hasidic movement drew the bulk of its most zealous following
from there. Social radicalism, on the other hand, surfaced much later
on and we actually know very few of the names of supporters of the
French Revolution born on the soil of central Poland. The Jewish masses
of eastern Europe were at that time completely in the dark as to what
was going on in faraway, mythic Paris. Besides, fifty years later,
during the “springtime” of the nations (1848) on the barricades of
Lvov, Prague and Vienna there were lots of the sons of Jewish small
craftsmen; and still more were among the supporters of the Polish
national uprising of 1863. The processes of change under way inside the
Jewish community of central Europe during the second half of the
century have rightly been compared by Isaiah Berlin to the gradual
thawing of some gigantic glacier or iceberg. The outermost strata of
the emerging Jewish intelligentsia were of course those most inclined
to embrace a culture of acculturation and assimilation.

The cultural and ethnic groups surrounding them
and who first evolved a modern national consciousness (Germans, Poles,
Russians and, a short time later, Ukrainians and Lithuanians) started
seriously to compete in recruiting them to the cause. The belated
national backlash followed the example set by neighbouring peoples and
was designed to build a separate Jewish nation. On Russian soil,
moreover, this happened slightly later. A sizable segment of the
younger generation made a stand on the basis of an extreme
internationalism, imitating the example of the glorious undertakings of
the renowned Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). Some of these
wound up embracing marxism but others made up the first cohort of
Russian anarchist Jews. On Polish soil, the Russian Jews (known as the litvaks) were looked at askance, as was anything Russian. Whereas in Russia the youth turning away from the cheder
[religious school] were enthralled by the idea of “going to the
people”, their contemporaries in the lands of Congress Poland and in
Galicia in the 1870s and 1880s hoped to be accepted by and admitted to
the Polish intelligentsia. In the following decade, in a backlash
against a burgeoning anti-Semitism, the bulk of them threw themselves
into Jewish movements. Certainly there are lots of Jewish names to be
found in the ranks of the Polish socialist parties, but as a percentage
they accounted for a rather tiny figure when set alongside the numbers
in the Russian movements.

The first out-and-out anarchists to be found
among Polish Jews popped up in artisan circles in emigration in London
and Paris from 1884 on. It was anarchist emigrés returning from Paris
who in 1903 in Bialystok launched the first libertarian group made up
entirely of Jews.9 Before
then, there was the odd individual Jew drawn above all from the
intellectual and artistic circles that felt drawn to anarcho-communism.
Jewish artists who had studied in Munich or in Paris were among those
most disposed to embrace libertarian teachings. Mecislas Goldberg10 (aka Mieczyslaw Goldberg), a publicist and drama critic in fin de siècle Paris, became an anarchist from head to toe, even though he had earlier been in touch with Polish nationalists.11
The reasons underlying political and ideological choices are
complicated and not always clear-cut, even to those who made those
choices. The availability of a number of personal accounts in this
instance provides us with a good opportunity for singling out the chief
motives, though. The leading one appears to have been a craving for
justice, a fervent desire to live in a better world free of injustice,
borders, classes, ethnic or national divisions: a world in which the
fate of the individual would be determined exclusively by his actions.
Whilst marxists believed in historical determinism, those who plumped
for anarchism tended instead to base their own aspirations on freedom
and on themselves.12 In the
case of Jewish anarchists, there were no less important specific
reasons such as the fact that this was an ideology seemed to offer the
most radical therapy for moving beyond social insignificance and for
combatting anti-Semitism. The universal outlook which not only resolved
the Jewish question at a stroke but also settled the issue of all
nations and religions through one great “brotherhood of human beings”
had no doubt attracted many who were in their position. Does that mean
that, on turning into followers of Proudhon, they had cast aside all
national characteristics? Definitely not. Even if the “black flag”
ideology was by nature universalist and even more open than the
socialist outlook, there were still clear differences between militants
from individual countries belonging to a range of cultural minorities.
Just as it is common practice to point up the differences between the
Spanish anarchist movement and its Italian or French counterparts, the
same goes for Jewish anarchism. It also had idiosyncratic features in
its Polish, Russian or Ukrainian versions.

Some writers tend to think
in terms of an identity impervious to alteration. According to them, a
person can have only one identity. Moshe Goncharok, for instance,
treats as Jews only such anarchists as mainly used Yiddish in their
political activity.13 This
way of thinking leaves me bewildered and strikes me as far removed from
reality. Lots of militants whom he would see only as Russians or
Ukrainians of Jewish extraction corresponded with their brother and
sister activists in Yiddish and, to cut a long story short, never
severed their ties to the Jewish community. They had merely made a
different choice: one of the few choices open to a Jew of radical
opinions. What little information we have about the activities of
anarchists operating in Warsaw, Lodz or Bialystok during the 1905-1907
revolution which is often rather over-inflatedly dubbed the Fourth
Polish Uprising tell us that Jewish anarchists busied themselves in
their own circles whilst at the same time working hand in glove with
Polish and Russian revolutionaries. Although Jews in linguistic terms,
culture and social background, they were simultaneously acknowledged
members of the Russian and Polish revolutionary members. R. Nagórski in
his short history of the Polish libertarian movements has no doubts
about this.14 And whilst
they were repeatedly denounced to the police, and especially by members
of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), this was down to the fact that
their ideology appeared to be jeopardising that party’s long-term
strategy. Besides, their choice was anything but ignored. And
anarchism’s low pulling-power for generations who had grown up at the
turn of the century was a direct result of the fierce ideological
competition between those who were trying to capture the imaginations
of young people at a time of belated awakening to national
consciousness. Young Jews (and 95% of militants were male) stepping
outside of a world of kehila [the
traditional Jewish community] and jettisoning Hasidism or religious
orthodoxy, had no need to join the most radical movements in order to
be treated like extremists by their most traditional compatriots.

The choice to support the Szymon Dubno-style ‘folkists‘
who gave pride of place to cultural autonomy and the use of Yiddish as
a mother tongue, or the Zionists (in all their leftwing and rightwing
varieties: and there were anarchist Zionists too, followers of the
French Jew Bernard Lazare), or indeed liberal progressives was quite a
radical act. True radical options led them towards the revolutionary
syndicalists or to join one of the many out-and-out marxist leftist
parties or parties that subscribed to a marxism blended with special
Jewish ingredients, such as the Bund (1897) which was affiliated to the Russian social democrats whilst holding out for full cultural autonomy, Poale Zion (1906) or, later, the Hashomer Hatzair.
The challenge of modernity and anti-Semitism doubtless worked in favour
of such radical choices. It even appears that the choice of anarchism
or anarcho-syndicalism loomed even more extreme. Disregarding Jewish
specialness in the name of widespread revolution was a genuinely bold
choice possible only for a limited group of individuals.

Serious deficiencies in the
sources make any attempt to identify precisely who took part in this
adventure very hard. Above all there is a dearth of first hand
testimony. We do not even know the real names (but only the aliases) of
a few militants. We can, though, analyse them as a group, starting our
bibliography with the details contained in the Slownik biograficzny dzialaczy polskiego ruchu rewolucynjego
(Biographical Dictionary of the Polish Revolutionary Movement), a
periodical publication carrying a wealth of details, albeit politically
influenced, its publication unfortunately ceasing at the letter K.
There we find that libertarian-minded militants accounted for less that
4% of the total number, but if we check the rather vague Russian
figures for the years 1905-1907 15
we can conclude that this tiny band was strongly represented in terms
of the victims and convicted (including those sentenced to death) who
amount to 10% overall. 16 And it can also be shown that that upwards of 80% of the anarchists listed in the Dictionary17 were
of Jewish extraction and that no other faction of the Polish
revolutionary movement can stand comparison with the libertarian
faction in this regard. Another consistent fact was the almost complete
absence of women. Among the upwards of 600 known members [in total] of
the Walka (Struggle) group in Bialystok, scattered through the Czarny Sztandar (Black Flag) group in Bialystok and Vilnius, in short-lived organisations in Warsaw like Internacjonal and Frajhajt or like Zmowa Robotnicza (Workers’ Conspiracy) and Rewolucyjni Msciciele
(Revolutionary Avengers) that were around during the revolutionary
period, we find a mere 10 women. In Russia this percentage was
remarkably higher, albeit not as high as the figure for militants in
the socialist movements.

A common denominator of the afore-mentioned
groups was an interest in violence, a militant anti-capitalism and a
credo deeply rooted in the anarcho-communist teachings of Kropotkin.18
Among the books seized during inquiries the writings of Kropotkin were
very often discovered. By contrast, there were few supporters of
tendencies such as what was known in Russia as the bezmotyvniki (motiveless) terror as well as pacifists of the Tolstoyan variety and the anarcho-syndicalists.

The first thing that emerges from researches is
the youthfulness of the militants. Generally speaking they are young
workers or artisans between the ages of 15 and 20. In age terms, these
militants stood out from members of the Belle Époque political and
social movements and bring to mind an analogy with the younger
generation’s modern protest movements.

From analysis of their social origins some
interesting conclusions can be drawn. Notwithstanding the widely held
view about their primarily proletarian origins, quite a few of these
anarchists were drawn from other strata of society. There were rebels
also to be found amongst the children of well to do businessmen and
well-off artisans, albeit that the majority of them came, naturally,
from the poorer orders. Which explains why most of the Polish anarchist
Jews from this first generation had had no formal education, unless we
count the elementary classes at the cheder. It was this unmet
need to understand the world that drove them into reading
unconventional literature and ultimately made them followers of
Proudhon, an auto-didact like themselves.

Another intriguing and consistent factor was the
fact that most of the militants had brothers who were usually older
brothers sympathetic to a variety of leftist factions and who had been
the first in the family to set out down that road. Thanks to them, the
younger siblings were in a position to plump for even more radical
options. This was true, say, of the families of Mieczyslaw Goldberg and
Izrael Blumenfeld who both belonged to the Internacjonal anarcho-communist group in Bialystok and of the weaver brothers Dawid and Szlama Bekker, who were Walka activists.

As for the profession of
the militants that we know about, the situation there is not greatly
different from that which has emerged from the information supplied, in
the case of France, by Jean Maitron and René Bianco.19
We find numerous representatives of “sedentary artisan trades” -
cobblers, tailors and hat-makers. But pride of place goes to the
weavers (and especially in Bialystok, Lodz and Zgierz). In Warsaw,
Krakow and Vilnius a telling role was played by members of the
intelligenstia too - the teachers, journalists and printing workers - a
sort of “aristocracy” of labour rubbing shoulders with the
intelligentsia proper. Such social and professional distinctions had no
real impact on stances vis a vis religion. In accordance with the
intellectual; trends of the day, anarchists described themselves as
“freethinkers” or “agnostics”. The leaflets and pamphlets they
distributed often poked fun at those Jews of their own generation who
renounced their Judaism only to embrace Christianity in its Catholic form.

Their rebellion was always, inevitably, directed
at Parents, Family and Religion. Jewish traditions and traditional
models of social organisation were depicted in darkest tones and
described as the greatest obstacles to a radical betterment of the lot
of their compatriots. Being themselves a characteristic product of the
breakdown of a society that was having to come to grips with the
inevitable process of modernisation, the anarchist Jews deliberately
decided to push that process as far as it might go. Outrages,
expropriations and other armed actions, ratcheting up existing, real
class conflicts, helped speed up the birth of the new society. Had they
been living in one of the western democracies as the London-based Arbeter Fraynt Club 20 members
were, they would probably have been peaceable supporters of prise au
tas (take what you need), Kropotkin-style. But in the dark reality of
tsarist Russia and in the seething atmosphere of Congress Poland they
could scarcely be anything other than radical, belligerent militants,
committed to an unequal struggle against overwhelming state forces by
whom they were constantly being hunted down and ruthlessly killed. The
Polish writer Stanislaw Brzozowski had paid them a splendid tribute in
his 1907 novel Plomienie (Flames). But other writers such as
Henryk Siekiewicz or Andrzej Strug (the famous, high-ranking socialist
exponent of Polish freemasonry) have caricatured them as demonic types
or nutcases always with bombs in hand. The views peddled about them in
respectable Jewish circles were equally unfair and dictated by
political conveniences.

Today, looking back over nearly a century, we can
arrive at a more generous characterisation of their handiwork. Whilst
not forgetting the exaggerated extremism of certain ideas and stances,
such as the simplistic world view, we should reassess their idealism
and the novelties that they introduced into Jewish life. But for that
radical faction, albeit a relatively small faction, the cultural and
political life of Jews on Polish soil would not have been as rich as it was.

12 For the general reasons leading on to the option for anarchism see A Hamon Psychologie de l’anarchiste-socialiste (Paris 1895) which is based on a questionnaire circulated by the author: see too a survey conducted by Le Libertaire (1902) and D. Grinberg Ruch anarchistyczny w Europie Zachodniej 1870-1914 (Warsaw 1994)